Complete Short Stories (VMC) (66 page)

He leant across the bar and took the rose from the glass and wiped it carefully on his handkerchief. Then, hoping he would not blush, he tucked it into her blouse.

The next morning, two dozen shop roses arrived by messenger.

When the bus turned round at the church and set off on its journey back to the town, Evie always felt marooned. Until it returned, in two hours’ time, there was no escape.

It was three o’clock on a late autumn afternoon – soft, misty weather. In the churchyard, graves were lost under the fallen leaves. There were pockets of web on the brambles and unseen strands of it in the air. From the bus-stop, Evie could see her great-aunt at work in the churchyard, raking leaves off the grave. She was wearing a forage cap of emerald-green wool that she had knitted herself, and she had tied a pinafore over her winter coat.

‘Well, girl,’ she said, when Evie joined her. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘Mother thought the news ought to come from me,’ Evie said. She sat down on a slab of polished granite and gazed at her aunt’s astonishing hat. ‘I’m getting engaged on Sunday,’ she said. ‘Norman’s bringing his mother and father to tea, and giving me the ring then. It’s a diamond with two amethysts.’

‘And when’s the wedding?’

Evie looked vague. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. Both Norman and I favour long engagements.’ She stood up quickly, hearing footsteps and not wanting to be seen sitting on a grave.

Phyllis Butcher was taking a short cut through the churchyard on her way from the post office. She nodded as she passed them, hurrying towards the lych-gate.

‘
She’s
offhand,’ Evie said. ‘There were two women talking about her on the bus. She was in the telephone box outside the post office as we went by. They were saying that she goes down there nearly every afternoon to ring someone up, although they’ve got the phone at the pub. I must say she looks the type. Does she still keep pestering you?’

‘She hasn’t been in since the summer. Fill that vase from the tap over there, will you?’

Evie took the stone urn, which was inscribed ‘In Loving Memory’, and made her way between graves to the water tap by the church wall. When she came back, the grave was raked free of leaves and Mrs Swan was untying the string round a bunch of bronze chrysanthemums.

‘I imagine her one of those people – gushing one moment and cutting you dead the next,’ Evie said, her thoughts still on Phyllis Butcher. ‘Every time I came last summer, she was stuck there in the kitchen. And putting you under an obligation with all those presents.’

‘I didn’t see any obligation in it.’

‘I told Mother about her, and she was quite annoyed. It wasn’t her place to carry on like that.’

‘I was sorry for her,’ Mrs Swan replied. ‘She did me no harm.’ She knelt down to arrange the flowers in the urn. ‘There, that looks nice, I think. I’m always pleased when the chrysanthemums come. Charlie was so fond of them.’

She straightened her back and pushed stray ends of hair under her cap. ‘If you bring the rake, I’ll take the basket. We’ll make a cup of tea, and you can tell me about your plans.’

They walked slowly to the lych-gate. The last of the yellow leaves were drifting down. On some graves, the chestnut fans lay flat, like outspread hands.

In the dark, raftered dining-room, Silcox counted the coned napkins and, walking among the tables, lifted the lids of the mustard pots and shook salt level in the cellars.

At the beginning of their partnership as waiter and waitress, Edith had liked to make mitres or fleurs-de-lis or water-lilies of the napkins, and Silcox, who thought this great vulgarity, waited until after he had made his proposal and been accepted before he put a stop to it. She had listened meekly. ‘Edwardian vulgarity,’ he had told her. Taking a roll of bread from the centre of the petalled linen, he whipped the napkin straight, then turned it deftly into a dunce’s cap.

Edith always came down a little after Silcox. He left the bedroom in plenty of time for her to change into her black dress and white apron. His proposal had not included marriage or any other intimacy and, although they lay every night side by side in twin beds, they were always decorous in their behaviour, fanatically prim, and he had never so much as seen her take a brush to her hair, as he himself might have said. However, there was no one to say it to, and to the world they were Mr and Mrs Silcox, a plain, respectable couple. Both were ambitious, both had been bent on leaving the hotel where they first met – a glorified boarding-house, Silcox called it. Both, being snobbish, were galled at having to wait on noisy, sunburned people who wore freakish and indecent holiday clothes and could not pronounce
crêpes de volaille
, let alone understand what it meant.

By the time Silcox heard of the vacancy at the Royal George, he had become desperate beyond measure, irritated at every turn by the vulgarities of seaside life. The Royal George was mercifully as inland as anywhere in England can be. The thought of the Home Counties soothed him. He visualised the landscape embowered in flowering trees.

In his interview with the manageress he had been favourably impressed by the tone of the hotel. The Thames flowed by beyond the geranium-bordered lawns; there would be star occasions all summer – the Fourth of June, Henley, Ascot. The dining-room, though it was small, had velvet-cushioned banquettes and wine-lists in padded leather covers. The ash-trays advertised nothing and the flowers had not come out of the garden.

‘My wife,’ he said repeatedly during the interview. He had been unable to bring her, from consideration to their employer. The manageress respected him for this and for very much else. She could imagine him in tails, and he seemed to wear the grey suit as if it were a regrettable informality he had been unable to escape. He was stately, eyes like a statue’s, mouth like a carp’s. His deference would have that touch of condescension which would make customers angle for his good will. Those to whom he finally unbent, with a remark about the weather or the compliments of the season, would return again and again, bringing friends to whom they could display their status. ‘Maurice always looks after me,’ they would say.

Returning to the pandemonium – the tripperish hotel, the glaring sky – he made his proposal to Edith. ‘Married couple’, the advertisement had stipulated and was a necessary condition, he now understood, for only one bedroom was available. ‘It has twin bedsteads, I ascertained,’ he said.

Marriage, he explained, could not be considered, as he was married already. Where the person in question (as he spoke of his wife) was at present, he said he did not know. She had been put behind him.

Until that day, he had never spoken to Edith of his personal affairs, although they had worked together for a year. She was reserved herself and embarrassed by this unexpected lapse, though by the proposal itself she felt deeply honoured. It set the seal on his approval of her work.

‘I think I am right in saying that it is what matters most to both of us,’ he observed, and she nodded. She spoke very little and never smiled.

The manageress of the Royal George, when Edith went for her separate interview, wondered if she were not too grim. At forty-five, her hair was a streaked grey and clipped short like a man’s at the back. She had no makeup and there were deep lines about her mouth which had come from the expression of disapproval she so often wore. On the other hand, she was obviously dependable and efficient, would never slop soup or wear dirty cuffs or take crafty nips of gin in the still-room whenever there was a lull. Her predecessor had done these things and been flighty, too.

So Edith and Silcox were engaged. Sternly and without embarrassment they planned arrangements for bedroom privacy. These were simply a matter of one staying in the bathroom while the other dressed or undressed in the bedroom. Edith was first to get into bed and would then turn out the light. Silcox was meanwhile sitting on a laundry basket in his dressing-gown, glancing at his watch until it was time to return. He would get into bed in the dark. He never wished her good-night and hardly admitted to himself that she was there.

Now a week had gone by and the arrangements had worked so smoothly that he was a little surprised this evening that on the stroke of seven o’clock she did not appear. Having checked his tables, he studied the list
of bookings and was pleased to note the name of one of his
bêtes noires
. This would put a spur to his pride and lift the evening out of the ordinary ruck. Pleasant people were not the same challenge.

Upstairs, Edith was having to hurry, something she rarely deigned to do. She was even a little excited as she darted about the room, looking for clean cuffs and apron, fresh dress preservers and some pewter-coloured stockings, and she kept pausing to glance at a photograph on the chest of drawers. It was postcard size and in a worn leather frame and was of an adolescent boy wearing a school blazer.

When she had gone back to the bedroom after breakfast she saw the photograph for the first time. Silcox had placed it there without a word. She ignored it for a while and then became nervous that one of the maids might question her about it, and it was this reason she gave Silcox for having asked him who it was.

‘Our son,’ he said.

He deemed it expedient, he added, that he should be a family man. The fact would increase their air of dependability and give them background and reality and solid worth. The boy was at a public school, he went on, and did not divulge to his friends the nature of his parents’ profession. Silcox, Edith realised with respect, was so snobbish that he looked down upon himself.

‘How old is he?’ she asked in an abrupt tone.

‘He is seventeen and working for the Advanced Level.’

Edith did not know what this was and wondered how she could manage to support the fantasy.

‘We shall say nothing ourselves,’ said Silcox, ‘as we are not in the habit of discussing our private affairs. But he is there if wanted.’

‘What shall we … what is his name?’

‘Julian,’ Silcox said and his voice sounded rich and musical.

Edith looked with some wonder at the face in the photograph. It was a very ordinary face and she could imagine the maids conjecturing at length as to whom he took after.

‘Who is he really?’ she asked.

‘A young relative,’ said Silcox.

In Edith’s new life there were one or two difficulties – one was trying to remember not to fidget with the wedding ring as if she were not used to wearing it, and another was being obliged to call Silcox ‘Maurice’. This she thought unseemly, like all familiarities, and to be constant in it required continual vigilance. He, being her superior, had called her Edith from the start.

Sleeping beside him at night worried her less. The routine of privacy was
established and sleep itself was negative and came immediately to both of them after long hours of being on their feet. They might have felt more sense of intimacy sitting beside one another in deckchairs in broad daylight, for then there would be the pitfalls of conversation. (How far to encroach? How much interest to show that could be shown without appearing inquisitive?)

Edith was one of those women who seem to know from childhood that the attraction of men is no part of their equipment, and from then on to have supported nature in what it had done for them, by exaggerating the gruffness and the gracelessness and becoming after a time sexless. She strode heavily in shoes a size too large, her off-duty coat and skirt were as sensible as some old nanny’s walking-out attire. She was not much interested in people, although she did her duty towards them and wrote each week to her married sister in Australia: and was generous to her at Christmas. Her letters, clearly written as they were, were still practically unreadable – so full of facts and times: where she took the bus to on her day off and the whole route described, where this road forked and that branched off and what p.m. she entered this or that café to progress from the grapefruit to the trifle of the
table d’hôte
(five and sixpence). Very poor service usually, she wrote – odd knives and forks left on the table while she drank her coffee, for no one took any pride nowadays.

Edith had no relations other than her sister; her world was peopled with hotel staff and customers. With the staff she was distant and sometimes grim if they were careless in their work, and with her customers she was distant and respectful. She hardly responded to them, although there were a very few – usually gay young men or courtly and jovial elderly ones – to whom she behaved protectively, as nannyish as she looked when she wore her outdoor clothes.

The other person in her life – Silcox – was simply to her the Establishment. She had never worked with anyone she respected more – in her mind, he was always a waiter and she always thought of him dressed as a waiter. On his day off, he seemed lowered by wearing the clothes of an ordinary man. Having to turn her eyes away from him when she glimpsed him in a dressing-gown was really no worse. They were not man and woman in one another’s eyes, and hardly even human beings.

No difficulties they were beset with in their early days at the Royal George could spoil the pleasures of their work. The serenity of the dining-room, the elaborate food which made demands upon them (to turn something over in flaming brandy in a chafing-dish crowned Silcox’s evening), the superiority of the clientele and the glacial table linen. They had suffered horrors from common people and this escape to elegance was precious to them both. The hazards that threatened were not connected
with their work, over which both had mastery from the beginning, but with their private lives. It was agonising to Edith to realise that now they were expected to spend their free time together. On the first day off they took a bus to another hotel along the river and there had luncheon. Silcox modelled his behaviour on that of his own most difficult customers, and seemed to be retaliating by doing so. He was very lordly and full of knowledge and criticism. Edith, who was used to shopping ladies’ luncheons in cafés, became nervous and alarmed. When she next wrote to her sister, she left this expedition altogether out of the letter and described instead some of the menus she had served at the Royal George, with prices. Nowadays, there was, for the first time in her life, an enormous amount that had to be left out of the letters.